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| - Menu: http://www.nokatoronto.com/userfiles/files/dinein2015.pdf
(This is the a la carte menu, we had the all you can eat dinner so not all the items on this menu were available.)
What we had: shrimp skewers, beef short ribs, fried chicken wings, fried chicken pieces (karaage), green onion rolled in beef, shrimp tempura, calamari tempura, various sashimi (salmon, salmon belly, butterfish, snapper), unagi (eel) sushi, "the bomb" roll, eel and avocado roll, fried ice cream dessert, various flavours of ice cream.
Taste: 7/10
To Noka's credit, their food tastes pretty good... if it arrives. Out of the appetizers, the shrimp skewers, short ribs, and the fried chicken were good. Our friends liked the green onion rolled in beef. The tempura, like most tempura you get at AYCE sushi, has a layer of batter twice as thick as the thing wrapped inside. You'd think "wow, they used a giant piece of shrimp/calamari/etc!" but then you bite into it and it's all batter. :(
The sashimi was a little hit and miss. Not all of the pieces were fresh. Most of our group liked the butterfish, and salmon is pretty much a staple. The salmon belly was really fatty and tender (not many AYCE places have this), Laura loved it but not everyone liked how fatty it was. Steven loves unagi so their unagi sushi was a hit for him. The bomb roll was drenched in various sauces and the sauces probably accounted for half of the calories in that roll, but it was delicious; over the course of the meal we ordered 3 bomb rolls amongst 7 of us. The eel and avocado roll was lacklustre in comparison.
The fried ice cream dessert a scoop of green tea ice cream inside a layer of banana bread coated with tempura batter. It was good and super filling. We also had various flavours of ice cream (green tea, red bean, mango) and they're pretty much the same as every AYCE sushi place.
Value: 9/10
Each person's cost is about $20+automatically included gratuity for AYCE dinner and they include salmon belly and unagi on the menu... that's pretty good for a downtown location. After tax this is probably around $25 per person. We don't like the idea of automatically included gratuity so we're not giving 10/10 for value.
Service/Convenience: 0.5/10
You are probably reading this review and seeing that we gave decently high ratings for taste and value, but why only 2 stars? Because the service here is terrible. 0.5 because the place was fairly easy to locate and at least the servers took our order papers.
We had a group of 7 so we ordered a lot and it was probably not easy to cater to us. That I understand, but even the pair sitting at a table next to us had to wait so long for their order that they eventually just gave up, paid, complained, and left.
Most of the first round (appetizer, sashimi, and 2 rolls) came fairly quickly. After that, we waited about 40 min for our next orders to arrive. We ordered unagi sushi in our first order and it did not come until the very end after we reminded the servers 3-4 times. (We were there for almost 2 hours. We can play the waiting game.) We had to keep reminding them about our orders.
Well, I guess now we know why the 12% gratuity is mandatory.
Would go back? No, not worth the headache.
Would recommend to friend? Probably not, unless if they are really, really patient and have a good memory for what they ordered.
Similar places: Pretty much any AYCE sushi place, though as of now we do not know of any others that serve salmon belly in their AYCE menu.
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